Link and System-Level NOMA Simulator: The Reproducibility of Research

This study focuses on the design of a MATLAB platform for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based systems with link-level and system-level analyses. Among the different potential candidates for 5G, NOMA is gaining considerable attention owing to the many-fold increase in spectral efficiency as compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA). In this study, a NOMA simulator is presented for two and more than two users in a single cell for link-level analysis; whereas, for system-level analysis, seven cells and 19 cells scenarios were considered. Long-term evolution (LTE) was used as the baseline for the NOMA simulator, while bit error rate (BER), throughput and spectral efficiency are used as performance metrics to analyze the simulator performance. Moreover, we demonstrated the application of the NOMA simulator for different simulation scenarios through examples. In addition, the performance of multi-carrier NOMA (MC-NOMA) was evaluated in the presence of AWGN, impulse noise, and intercell interference. To circumvent channel impairments, channel coding with linear precoding is suggested to improve the BER performance of the system.